Premarital hanky-panky!
on June 10, 2013 at 12:01 amChapter: Joyce the Squirrel
Characters: Joyce Brown, Sarah Clinton
Location: Joyce and Sarah's dorm room
…wait, was this where Joyce coined the term? Â Hrm. Â Maybe. Â Hey, Wack’d?
Anyway, this was during my “sex is shameful and we should stop talking about it” phase, obviously.
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Uh-oh, looks like FURREH WEEK
….is she freaking out over squirrels having sex without marriage?
Yeah, Joyce is weird like that.
They need the ceremony! And nuts!
I’m sure that squirrel has a face full of nuts already.
Somewhere, a pair of drums and a cymbal fall off a cliff.
I know it’s late but I have to say it:
badum-tish
Not just any squirrels. Anthropomorphic squirrels. Sexy anthropomorphic squirrels. Not that there’s any other kind of anthropomorphic squirrel, it just deserves to be said.
“Not that there’s any other kind of anthropomorphic squirrel”
I disagree. I find neither Rocky, the Flying Squirrel, or Secret Squirrel, to be sexy. And Sandy, from Spongebob Squarepants, is the least sexy of them all.
You, my friend, have clearly never typed in “Rocky the Flying Squirrel Rule 34” into your Google search bar.
Always wondered, was this meant to spoof the Sabrina Online webcomics? It’s about a skunk and not a squirrel, but I can’t think of any other comics that existed back in 1998 about furries.
There were many, many webcomics back then about furries.
There aren’t now?
Just because you don’t know about them doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
Also, I bet some were retroactively created the moment you said that. Don’t ask me how.
Well, wasn’t I just a sheltered ball of sunshine…
Then again it’s not like I was looking for the stuff.
Neither was I. I just know the Internet really, really well.
It’s the modern disease.
£10 says it’s SOME kind of Eric Schwartz creation, though not necessarily Sabrina. Probably “Amy the Squirrel”.
And now you’ll have to excuse me whilst I sit back and enjoy some surprisingly PG13 rated Geocities memories. So many rather talented teenage artistes who were once the only people putting artwork online, then fell off the wagon into “proper jobs” before even the rise of DeviantArt and the like had a chance to definitively either make or break them. I used to have galleries of their stuff downloaded on my HDD… and indeed printouts of such adorning my dorm room walls and door (on the outside), when “furry” wasn’t really so much of a thing outside of the real hardcore. I just saw it as an evolved form of yer typical anthropomorphic cartoon, with no special status or any fetishistic weirdness. I won’t deny furries their fun, but when it gets taken to that sort of extreme I personally have to turn off (…which is my general excuse for having deliberately steered clear of MLP:FIM so far – I’ll give it a look once its proponents stop obsessively ramrodding it into every last nook and cranny of the net. I can name at least six or seven characters, draw their vague appearance and describe their general personalities without even having watched an episode of the show or seen any of the toys … it just ain’t right).
Willis, I guess, is one of the rare survivors of that period. And given the relative roughness of the Roomies! artwork vs how SP! and DoA look now, one can only wonder what the already more composed rivals of the period would have gone on to achieve if they had kept up their “hobby”, as it would then have been coyly labelled.
(Schwartz is not so much a survivor as an aloof overlord, having been tooning since before computers could even handle it, and then e-tooning (with his beloved Amigas) long before the web came along… therefore having a wealth of stuff to flood the net with pretty much immediately graphical browsing became a “thing” instead of the old online world where a disjointed collection of text-based BBSes and FTPs ruled the world, and you never knew quite what was in an image file until after you downloaded it… he’s still going simply because he never stopped at ANY point… Oddly the same seems to be true of Mark Stanley of “Freefall”, even though he DOES still have a “proper job”…)
Blimey that went to a bit of a weird place. This is what happens when you scan back through what you’ve written and decide to edit a couple of “little bits” in the middle but the edit box only shows five limited-width lines at a time…
I’m not sure the brony crowd is going to stop pushing it everywhere. :-/ Which is why I mostly stay away from it these days. Except when I happen to write songs about ponies. Or go to meetups in real life, or conventions.
I suppose I mostly just stay away from the brony internet presence. It is possible to do that and still watch the show.
I dunno, maybe this comment wasn’t the most enlightened idea.
One of the oldest still running webcomics is furry – Kevin and Kell, which started in 1995. It is not, however, sexy.
The thing is that “furry” (as in fetish) and “anthromorphic animals” (as in…er…antrhomrophic animals) have gotten kinda run together and lumped under the former title, which makes things awkward at times when people assume your not minding the latter (Freefall, for instance, is a dang good comic strip, even if its passage of time makes Girl Genius’ look turbocharged) means you’re one of the former.
^ this 😉
KnK is still going? I haven’t looked in on it in possibly-literal donkey’s years. Be interesting to see what kind of art evolution you get after 18 straight years on the job.
(Mind you, FF and GG have been going a right long time themselves and have reached a comfortable plateau – like Schultz did, and your typical mangaka does – so maybe it’ll feel like slipping into an old pair of sneakers than the fleeting discomfort of a brand new pair of dress shoes…)
Hmm, hard to be entirely sure as their server is busily crashing right now, but from the graphics it WILL show us, it seems slightly evolved. Still very recognisable, but the linework seems cleaner/finer and the colours a bit bolder rather than just being occasional highlights. That or my memory is just plain playing tricks.
‘Furry’ is not a fetish. Furry, since the time it was coined in the early 80s, referred to anthropomorphic animal fandom, full stop.
It was the morons at 4chan who declared it a fetish.
The best “furry” ever — print or online — was Omaha the Cat Dancer.
It was definitely a fetish before 4chan. They possible brought more attention to that aspect, but that’s all.
@Kelly: There was such a thing as a “furry fetish”, but treating the term “furry” like it was inherently fetishistic is a bit more recent, as far as I’m aware. It’s been years, though.
As with most of the stuff written from your weird fundie point of view, this still ended up being funny and most of the weirdness doesn’t register by coincidence.
It’s weird how much context I missed out on when I first read these strips.
Nah, most of us didn’t pick up on Willis’s repression – I mean, isn’t the whole joke here Joyce’s shock anyways?
How did you ever get from “sex is shameful and we should stop talking about it” to “postin’ arts of lesbian third base on the interwebs”?
Hit puberty really late.
Puberty sure must have hit you with a sledge-hammer then.
And then there was the beautiful pirate lass who kidnapped him, made him her cabin boy, then made him a man.
I’m not finding it anywhere earlier than this so I’m calling it: “Premarital hanky-panky”, date of birth, January 4th 1999.
Wait, ’99? Have we already had a full year at the college before this?
Yeah. Danny and Joe started in Fall ’97, went home at the end of the Spring ’98 semester here, and came back for Fall ’98 in the very next strip. Howard’s a year behind Danny and Joe; he arrived Fall ’98 (with Ruth, who has presumably been around but not crossed paths with the boys before, in tow). They just had the ’98 Christmas break, so they’re back in school for Spring ’99.
It goes surprisingly quickly without weekends and holidays.
OK … um what?
Yeah, I need to open the archive in a new tab then fling it over to the other monitor to try and keep up with that.
Sooo… our June 8 was their Dec 31st 1998/Jan 1st 1999? And our June 9 their Jan 2nd 1999? Just trying to figure how there was already one christmas and then a summer break hidden within what went before.
Man, I’m not even sure I remember New Years 98/99. Not that it was heavily boozy, just that it was probably pretty nondescript. (But 99/2000 will live in infamy as being a humongous damp squib).
(one archive trawl later)
Ah right, I got it now. Summer was literally blink-and-miss-it, though there WAS the whole RA floor meeting thing 9_9
Still haven’t found the first Christmas, but I think I’m re-synced now. Thanks for the heads up.
Yeah, as Willis mentioned a few days ago, until the “at home for the holidays” strips we just had, Roomies! only posted when IU was in session. So that “blink-and-miss-it” summer break was at the time a months-long hiatus coinciding with the actual IU summer break.
And that’s why it’s going so fast… we’re blazing through seven strips a week, rain or shine, while the original run skipped a lot of days for breaks and holidays and weekends and so on. Even adding in the occasional bonus strips doesn’t fill all those days.
And if you missed the ’97 Christmas break, don’t feel bad. So did the characters.
Hey, that’s my birthday! (Not the year, of course).
I was way too excited about getting to this week, since the beginning of Bring Back Roomies. It was the only time while reading the original comics where I felt weirded out. Not because of the subject matter, but because of the Willis’ reaction to the subject matter. I went “Wow, this author is clearly writing about something he has no knowledge or acceptance of whatsoever.” It felt really awkward.
But then there were aliens and cheese gods and Mike and I was back along for the ride, baby.
Yeah, I really never got the vibe that Joyce was the agent of any kind of message from you until maybe the second year of It’s Walky. She was a complete freakin’ basket case. Nothing about her viewpoint seemed worth emulating. I think that your subconscious already knew this.
I never read Roomies back in its original day, so I don’t have any context here. Was “Tina the Squirrel” a real thing back then, or is it something you made up?
At a guess, it’s a reference to an amalgamation of various well known (or at least, well known for the era) furry characters. One presumes the greatest hits of Eric W Schwartz. Close enough to be recognisable, different enough to respectfully avoid any copyright issues.
But, as Willis said, there was already a LOT of furry characters out there in the mid 90s, it’s something that had been ticking over since the early pre-www internet days if not earlier.
My own first taste was from a page I fetched up on whilst hitting the “random homestead” button on Geocities. At the time, as a newb, I thought it was very nearly the best thing I’d ever seen.
But for the artist being basically G-rated and not having any squirrel or poodle characters (or any named as “X the Y”* :D), you could just as well argue that it was some of hers. OK, that’s a bit of a leap, but eh.
Still occasionally search up whatever site she posts on these days (I guess it’s probably shifted over to tumblr, now? It HAS been a while) but it sadly never went beyond a hobby; she’s a high level research entomologist now. Life happened whilst other plans were being made.
*On this basis you could quite easily just blame Sonic The Hedgehog and his pals. Except Sally Acorn of course. And Miles Prower. Erm. This argument is kind of falling apart around my ears, I’d better stop.
I didn’t think that furries went back this far! I thought they came in with the bronies!
Furries go back to at least Disney’s Robin Hood in 1973. Probably long, long before then.
Folks love their animals.
Don’t forget Betty Boop used to be a dog.
Nah man, you can trace that shit easily as far back as the first Merrie Melodies. Or in fact at least to the illustrated versions of the Renard stories.
Uh, not like I’ve, um, researched this or anything. Hey! Is that a demonic duck of some sort?! *flees*
(I’m pretty sure my paternal grandfather is one, at that special Narnia-level of closetedness that comes with having grown up in a very straight laced northern english community in the 1920s and 30s… Was endlessly drawing me what were basically rather weird variations on the anthro idea when I was little. Mainly horses. If I was to show plonk him in front of a computer, type “anthro horse art” into google with safesearch off, his head would just about asplode…)
“Show plonk”? Maybe I should rearrange my schedule to “drink coffee, THEN derp around on webcomics pages”.
Delete “show”, in this case. I think it was a sentence that underwent spontaneous apoptosis halfway through.
Wait…what?
You thought bronies predated us?
Cripes, I feel old.
You mean in the “came before” sense, not the “hunt and eat” sense, right? Either is kind of worrying.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there was at least a smaller but similar following of the original 1980s version, which would therefore mean they pre-date at least some of the people reading this strip. Hopefully there aren’t any five- (three?) year-olds independently reading webcomics and commenting on them…
You…
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaat?
Yeah, didn’t learn about furries and bronies until recently, kinda figured they went hand-in-hand in a way. *cough*fanart*cough*
You poor, poor sheltered lucky unadulterated bastard.
It’s so bittersweet to see their cloying innocence, swiftly followed by its utter destruction, isn’t it?
Trying to remember when I first heard about the former type now… I know I was quite well aware of the art genre for a while without thinking it had any special term (MAYBE “anthro”, but that was fairly tame as I had “how to draw cartoons” books that used the unabbreviated version). It was probably only once it started coalescing into its own packaged-up genre of adult material and general fetish that the F-word bubbled to the surface.
Whereas bronies, I think I actually came across THAT term before even knowing about the TV show. The modern, all-pervading, high speed, mobile, always-on, easily searchable, endlessly re-micro-blogged internet has hypercompressed how long it takes for a meme to spread and become popular. Back in the pre-social-network, “start your modem on purpose, connect at 28k and hope you can find a route through the links from your usual start page to the content you’re looking for” days, things that now take hours could instead take months. Look at how long All Your Base lasted, fer cryin’ out loud, a drawn-out howl echoing slowly around the nascent web rather than being a rapidly reflected lightning flash.
Yeah it makes me feel old. Not least that my first computer grot may well have been sourced originally from some website, or more likely FTP or BBS … but it landed in my sweaty teenage (tweenage?) hands by way of someone’s random, endlessly passed around, nth-generation-copy floppy disc. In GIF format, because no-one generally used more than 256 colours.
Far from sheltered, more like young and spending most of his time on the internet doing Nerd stuff and vandalizing Wikipedia for giggles.
@tahrey I was lucky in that my first exposure to the nascent modern furry fandom was through IRL friends rather than online. This was back in the days when one had to buy physical “internet phonebooks” or get lucky on usenet or mailing lists or BBSs to find practically anything though. By the time I saw the more unseemly side of that fandom I’d already mostly seen worse just by virtue of being into anime, which was half the reason I was online, as it made it easier to find people with stuff I hadn’t already seen… *sighs* the ’90s
@bookwormdalek Young and on Wikipedia is an odd combination for my POV, but then when I was young and online AOL was just becoming a thing. Mind you, my comment was intended as comedic not a barb.
I guess young Willis didn’t know what hit points were either. Took me a while to understand what Sarah was refering to.
Do people even still use internet hit counters? There must be a site out there somewhere.
I fancy setting up a page of my own with some kind of clickbait on it and a counter, just to see how high it goes.
I thought we’d seen it before. Maybe I just read too many of your comics (this is highly possible!)
Sorry, you have to be at least this furry… *holds palm out horizontally against a line on a board that says “Baghi”* …to ride this thread. Unfortunately, little girl, you only measure up to somewhere between the nekokomimi and kemono lines. You’ll have to sit this one out and wait for your parents at the exit.
If Sarah thinks the squirrels in furry sex webcomics are “anatomically correct”, she doesn’t know much about squirrels.
I do believe that the Sarcasm is strong in Sarah.
I wonder what fillings Joyce has in her Invisible Sandwich?
Probably HAM AND CHEESE!
Mwahahaha, take that Joyce!
… Wait, did I just se my friend get referred to by name by a successful comic artist?
Is this an alternate dimension? Now I’m wonder just how long Wack’d has been behind the scenes of this universe.
I started reading in 2010. I dunno at what point I became the go-to guy for things like this.
Originally posted:
January 4, 1999